The Common Core State Standards introduced last year placed an emphasis on technology in curriculums for public schools across the country.

Dardanelle elementary and middle schools have found more than just an instructional opportunity with technology— they’ve found a way to increase both collaborative efforts between students and the efficiency of research done both at school and at home.

“We try to take the new Common Core State Standards, as well as the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), and blend them into our classroom instruction,” said Karie Kuras, the district’s technology instructional supervisor.

For example, students created a weather safety video earlier this week to satisfy standards that required students to understand and demonstrate weather safety. They created storyboards detailing what children should do in different weather-related situations, which they will show to second- or third-graders at the school.

The school also began using Google School at the beginning of this school year, a Google application that students can access from computers at school or at home, making it easier for them to coordinate and conduct research from different computers.

“It’s like a standard Gmail and Google Docs account but secure,” Kuras said, referring to Google’s email service. “We’ve found a lot of great uses for it. It’s a secure environment, so they can’t send or receive emails outside of our environment. [It’s more convenient because of] the demand of kids needing to do research and losing their work. When you use a flashdrive, not everything’s compatible, and you don’t want to worry about bringing viruses into the school.”

Kuras said while it was unrelated to Common Core, the service still helped them to fulfill many of its standards.

“One of the threads in all the writing standards is research to build and present knowledge,” she said. “So we do anything we can to meet that overarching idea.”

The Google application also features a sharing option which allows students to collaborate on a project from two or more computers simultaneously. If they were working on a PowerPoint, for example, students could be working on different slides or even editing the same slides.

“In the past, when you were a kid [and working in a group], you had to pull your desk up to the computer and take turns working on a project,” Kuras said. “But now, if one person shares it with another, then they can work on the same document at the same time.”

This helps to fulfill the collaborative aspect of Common Core State Standards.

“Collaboration is an important part of Common Core and twenty-first century skills,” she said.